I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Jun 2012
Interview
I had two telephonic interviews. First one is with Carlos and second one is with Piyush. The first one is very good, he asked me about basic C++ questions, V-tables, polymorphism, multithreaded issues, deadlock etc. He also asked me to design an algorithm to find the big number in a stack without doing a full search and to store some data so that user can search with for a specific city and for a range of values. I proposed him a hash table for map and he was satisfied.
However, my second interview did not go very well. The person on other end was very bookish. He does not like answers from general principle, always wants the answers as written in the book. For example, he asked me what a pure virtual function is. My answer was that a virtual function which does not has an implementation. He said that it is not you have to write function and assign it to zero. Does not it mean the same thing? After that he asked me about the advantages and disadvantages of multi threading application, I gave hive two three points in both side, but looks like he is looking for something else, always interrupt my answer with “what else”. He asked me to design a smart pointer class. I did not do very well on it as I was mixing the idea of a com object with smart pointer and introduced the add ref and release logic to it. I know that I was bit confused at the time. Then he asked me to design an algorithm to find group of two numbers, from an unlisted array of numbers, whose sum is 11. I did one with NXN complex. He asked me if I can do with N complexity. I told him that without any additional memory I will not be able to design it right now, but I have to think about it. The interview last for 48 min and he told me that HR people will let me know. Just in one hour I got an e-mail from HR saying that they cannot continue my candidacy. Beware of the guy and answer the question exactly as it is written in book.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Advantages and disadvantages of multi threaded programming
Terrible communication. Got passed between 3 different recruiters all of whom gave specific dates for updates and blew past them. Descriptions of what would be covered in the interviews are wholly inaccurate (don’t bother reading the PDF they sent to “prep” you, almost none of it came up in any of the 3 interviews I did with them.)
Interviewers themselves were decent but clearly had exact “right” answers they were looking for. What’s the point of a leetcode question where there’s only one way to implement it? What’s the point of a system design interview where you’re having a candidate parse through a complex system that they clearly already know everything about and are just looking for 1-2 EXACT modifications to check off their boxes? Was there even a right answer? I genuinely don’t know what this company was looking for. Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of resources. Avoid, avoid, avoid
Interviewed with two separate teams. Coding rounds. Leet code style question. The interview went on for 1 hr. Waiting for the next steps. The seem to like link lists and arrays